


I've looked for you

by Yumessc



Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:27:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29888001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yumessc/pseuds/Yumessc
Summary: This is a short story about Zhan Zhengxi thoughts while Jian Yi has disapperead from his life during the college years. I tried to figure out how he felt and lived without knowing where his friend was.
Relationships: Jian Yi/Zhan Zhengxi (19 Days)
Kudos: 7





	I've looked for you

I've looked for you. 

You don't know how much I did. 

You have no idea how many miles I've ground on foot, rummaging through every corner of the city, every face in the crowd of the subway or on the street. And when I felt like I recognized your blonde hair, your voice or your look, you can't know how bad the heart hurt when is breathing with relief and shrinking soon after, more and more as hope slipped away. I consumed my eyes on the mobile phone display, night and day, waiting for your message, going so far as to curse anyone else who called me or wrote because it wasn't you, to memorize everything we had written to each other until that last, bloody, night. 

I waited for you outside your house, hours and hours, after ringing the bell and having no response. I asked about you in every hospital, fearing something had happened to you. I looked for your mother, He Tian and his brother... But they were all gone, as if they never existed, as if you were nothing but a figment of my imagination. Maybe it would have hurt less, believing something like that, rather than thinking you were just gone. 

Your desk was empty for a while, even that hurt; your absence made itself felt, heavy and bulky like a boulder and that table on which you had engraved our initials that I had covered with a doodle, that chair orphaned by you, were there to remind me every single day that you were no longer by my side. Then one morning I saw notebooks on it - on that desk, and I thought you were back; I wanted to insult you, get mad at you, beat you, because you abandoned me after all our promises; I wanted to apologize, because the last time we spoke, I told you horrible things – out of jealousy and anger, frustration and guilt. Because I was the one who asked you to keep our story in the shadows, to protect us – or maybe it was just to protect me – and when I saw you talk to that other guy, more beautiful, more funny, stronger and more confident than me, I believed that he would take you away from me, that you would allow it. When I saw the notebooks, I wanted to tell you all this. And I wanted to hit you anyway: you shouldn’t have to disappear, you had no right; you and I had always solved things, in our own way, we never apart for any reason. Paralyzed, I stared at those notebooks and realized that I just wished to hear your voice say my name while you jumped on my back like you had done millions times before. But it didn't happen. It wasn't you. 

That night I wrote you a desperate message, the last one: "Asshole, come back. You have to come back. If you don't come back by tomorrow, you won't find me waiting for you." You never read it. If you had, you would have understood, I know, what those words were hiding and that it was not true that I would not have expected you. I never stopped doing so, even though in the meantime my heart had stopped gasping for every little glimmer of hope and my eyes began to stare at the floor, tired of looking for you among the people and meeting only anonymous and useless faces. 

Yet I always went back there, to the places we had been together: the park bench, the lookout where we celebrated your birthday, even the ramen bar where you got drunk every time. I kept looking for you inside me, in the memories that have become less sharp, of your smiles and your tears, of your words and your silences. I looked for you in the songs we listened to together, in pictures of us as children, or the dumb messages you left me on schoolbooks. I consumed myself, unable to resign. 

I blamed myself for not being able to become strong enough to protect you -as I promised you. I felt alone. And then I never felt anything, for so much time. If I had to tell how I lived, I couldn't. I went on, somehow, perhaps because a part of me, in some remote corner of my heart, never gave up on the idea of living without you and then put me on standby, because nothing made sense to be lived without being able to share it with you. 

Until today. Until I heard the bell ring and for a moment I thought I wouldn't even go open: whoever it was, would come back, if it mattered. But it didn't stop. I opened without even looking from the peephole, because there could be nothing interesting, the gaze always fixed on the floor, the mind ready to look for any excuse to quickly get rid of the hassle coming, because only that could be. 

Time stopped when I found myself staring at a pair of familiar shoes; my heart seemed to have suddenly woken up to bounce down my throat, I looked up, slowly, fearing of being wrong. The legs, the shirt - bloodied - and finally your face. Even that blood- dirty. Your look, your smile. They are always the same under the dirt and layers of pain. 

I'd recognize them everywhere.

You're back.


End file.
